Xbox Hard Drive Mod

The original hard drive can be replaced with a larger one. Then Xbox games can be copied from the DVD to the hard disk with programs such as DVD2Xbox and PxHDDLoader, and then played directly from the hard drive. This allows the user to spare game disks from scratching and allows for faster load times.

This process does require a modded Xbox using one of the alternative dashboards, and is used by scrupulous users to eliminate load times or leave their games in storage, and by unscrupulous users to play illegally copied games.

Beyond gaming, a modded Xbox can be used as a media center with the Xbox Media Center software (XBMC) allowing the playing of DVDs without the DVD dongle/remote and streaming of music and video files from the hard drive or from another computer over a network. A modded Xbox can even be configured into a computer running Linux, FreeBSD, or Microsoft Windows CE operating systems.

Why lock (or unlock) Xbox drive?

If you elect to put a new hard drive in your Xbox you MUST first already have a mod-chip in the machine that supports hard drive swapping.

The normal bios and first and second generation mod chips were never designed to support drive swapping. The original unmodified bios code for handling the drive is contained on those bios chips.

As you will see later, locking a drive requires that the Xbox be first able to utilize an unlocked drive.

As a result DO NOT proceed unless you know that your bios/mod chip already supports hard drive swapping.

If you have a mod chip and replacement bios which does support the “hard drive swap” there is no immediate compelling reason to lock the hard drive. Your Xbox will actually operate just fine with the replacement drive.

It has also been found that XboxLive works quite well with modified Xboxes, though there are some dashboard issues which I will not cover here.

This being the case, why are you still reading?
Probably because you are a bit paranoid and believe that you MUST put the Xbox back into it’s pristine state to get XboxLive to work. You don’t really have to though.

You may also have a Matrix type Mod/Bios chip and want to utilize the dual boot function that makes your machine revert back to the original BIOS. You could merely elect to disable this function by setting the chip to “mode 2” that always keeps the flashed bios on.